Sometimes Conspiracy Theories Are True

by Alexander Cockburn

Unlike the French or the Italians, for whom conspiracies are an integral
part of government activity, acknowledged by all, Americans have been
temperamentally prone to discount them. Reflecting its audience, the press
follows suit. Editors and reporters like to offer themselves as hardened
cynics, following the old maxim "Never believe anything till it is
officially denied," but in truth, they are touchingly credulous, ever
inclined to trust the official version, at least until irrefutable
evidence - say, the failure to discover a single WMD in Iraq - compels them
finally to a darker view.

Once or twice a decade some official deception simply cannot be sedately
circumnavigated. Even in the 1950s, when the lid of government secrecy was
more firmly bolted down, the grim health consequences of atmospheric testing
of nuclear weapons in the South Pacific, Utah, and Nevada finally surfaced.
In the late 1960s, it was the turn of the CIA, some of its activities first
exposed in relatively marginal publications like The Nation and Ramparts,
then finally given wider circulation.

Even then the mainstream press exhibited extreme trepidation in running any
story presuming to discredit the moral credentials of the U.S. government.
Take assassination as an instrument of national policy. In these post-9/11
days, when Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, publicly
declares, as he did before the House Intelligence Committee, that the
government has the right to kill Americans abroad, it is easy to forget that
nothing used to more rapidly elicit furious denials from the CIA than
allegations about its efforts, stretching back to the late 1940s, to kill
inconvenient foreign leaders. . . .

Maybe now the decline in power of the established corporate press, the
greater availability of dissenting versions of politics and history, and the
exposure of the methods used to coerce public support for the attack on Iraq
have engendered a greater sense of realism on the part of Americans about
what their government can do. Perhaps the press will be more receptive to
discomfiting stories about what Washington is capable of in the pursuit of
what it deems to be the national interest. Hopefully, in this more fertile
soil, Syd Schanberg's pertinacity will be vindicated at last, and those
still active in politics who connived at this abandonment will be forced to
give an account.